I was going through an old program I have, from an Ottawa ’67s game I was at back in 1976, and I found my ticket stub inside! Such a bonus!

Here you’ll see Doug Wilson, general manager of the San Jose Sharks, when he looked like a white Jimi Hendrix. You can see Bruce Boudreau, now coaching the Anaheim Ducks, who had won the scoring championship the previous year, along with a bunch of guys who would also make the NHL, including Habs Doug Jarvis and Mark Napier.

And no, the picture of six Ottawa players isn’t a “Wanted” poster at the cop shop.

Peter Lee, on the cover and also in that one particular photo, would score 81 goals in this ’75-’76 season and was chosen by the Habs 12th overall. He’d go on to play for the Nova Scotia Voyageurs, but before he would ever wear the CH, he and Canadiens Peter Mahovlich were traded to Pittsburgh for Pierre Larouche.

Also included – Boudreau accepting the Memorial Cup, and Bobby Orr telling us about Yardley Black Label.

Before Jean Beliveau packed the Quebec Colisee as the best senior hockey player in the world with the Quebec Aces, he was a star junior with the Citadelles of the Quebec Junior Hockey League. This program, which I got my mitts on only recently, is from the 1949-50 season, with Le Gros Bill wearing number nine. He would have been about 18 at this time.

Here the Citadelles are playing the Verdun Maple Leafs, the junior team the Rocket once played for, and as you can see, the coach is none other than Hall of Famer Sylvio Mantha, who starred for the Canadiens from 1923 to 1937, and was captain of the team for much of that time. Sylvio’s younger brother Georges was also a great Hab from 1928 to 1941.

Look how dapper Jean Beliveau is in this cover photo (below) of Vista from March 1989.

Inside is a nice feature, (if you’re a Habs fan) titled “The Way They Win,” about how the Canadiens up to that point had remained faithful to tradition and won often over the years, whereas the Toronto Maple Leafs continue to sink in quicksand. Writer Don Gillmor, who was a 34-year old Montrealer and Habs fan, said this about the Leafs…”The Leafs now start each season in winning form, prompting the faithful, the naive and the masochistic to declare, silently in the form of a prayer: maybe this year is the year. It never is, though, and the slow, inexorable decline begins each summer.”

This 23-year old quote mirrors almost exactly what happened to the Leafs this past season, only they held on until the last 25 games or so before they fell apart. But it’s nice too see how some things never change.

Beliveau was vice-president of corporate affairs for the Habs at that time, and he talks of the success of team marketing, with Gillmor giving examples of the number of souvenir boutiques around the city (18), the constant reminders to fans from the team about past glory and ghosts, and the involvement of former players such as Serge Savard as big reasons for the successful franchise.

It’s an article oozing with praise for the Habs, chalk-full of comparisons between them and the sad-sack Leafs and it’s nice to read, but I can see how legions of hockey followers learned to hate the Habs from articles such as this. It certainly has more than enough paragraphs of smugness. But having said this, I loved it.

Yes, things were better then. There was even another Stanley Cup to come a few years up the road. But that was then and this is now. It’s been dismal and the hockey world knows it and way too many love it.

On Friday, September 19, 1986, the Montreal Canadiens played an exhibition game against the Edmonton Oilers at the Ottawa Civic Centre. I lived in Ottawa at the time but sometimes, as was the case here, real life gets in the way and I had to work and couldn’t go. Just like the time I had a couple of front row seats for Roy Orbison at the National Arts Centre and was out on a truck run, got back late, and missed that too.

But my buddy Frank and his son Robin went to this Habs-Oilers clash, and brought me back a program.

This was a charity event for the Canadian Cystric Fibrosis Foundation, and two beauty teams went at it that night. Montreal had won the Stanley Cup that previous spring, and boasted Patrick Roy in nets, along with guys like Bobby Smith, Larry Robinson, Guy Carbonneau, Bob Gainey, Chris Chelios, and Stephane Richer.

The Oilers were pretty well in a class by themselves. They had won the two previous Cups, in 1984 and 1985, and the two after, in 1987 and `88, with a lineup of Wayne Gretzky, Grant Fuhr, Paul Coffey, Glenn Anderson, Mark Messier, Jari Kurri etc.

Edmonton won the game that night 8-3, so maybe it was good that I missed it.

Don Cherry belonged to the Montreal Canadiens for a short time in the early 1960’s, until Sam Pollock took him aside one day and asked him to lay off the beer. Cherry said he wouldn’t and was promptly shipped to the Spokane Comets of the Western Hockey League where he played one season (68 games, 9 goals, 13 assists), before moving on to the Rochester Americans of the AHL.

This is Cherry, number 6, with the Hull-Ottawa Canadiens of the EPHL (Eastern Professional Hockey League) in an exhibition game against the Boston Bruins before the start of the 1962-63 season. Hull-Ottawa, a farm team of the Habs, supplied many, many players to the big club in those days. Don just wasn’t one of them.